The Curtain Goes Up Again at Sardi's

By MOLLY O'NEILL

Published: November 2, 1990

Among the glitzy marquees and crumbling sidewalks of the theater district recently, a hand-lettered sign was propped in the window of a darkened restaurant for more than a month. "Very soon I will reopen Sardi's The Longest Running Show on Broadway," it read, and it was signed "Vincent Sardi."

Similar posters have become indigenous to New York City's landscape. More often than not, the reopening notices are replaced by others that say "Closed" or "Foreclosure"; New Yorkers have learned to avert their eyes.

But pedestrians on West 44th Street yesterday noticed that the sign was gone, the windows were shining and the 79-year-old restaurant's facade had a new coat of Chianti-red paint. Tonight Sardi's is opening its doors to the public again.

The restaurant has been closed since July, but it hasn't been itself for many years. In its heyday, Sardi's was Glamour. It was John Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Lilian Gish, Rex Harrison, Marilyn Monroe. It was a world of red-leather banquettes, silk stockings, cigarettes glimmering in onyx holders and sauces warming in copper pans at tableside. It was the brightest light of the Great White Way.

And Mr. Sardi, who ran the restaurant that his father began as a speakeasy in 1921, was the unofficial mayor of 44th Street. In addition to pouring cocktails mean enough to please Damon Runyon, and serving top-shelf roast beef, filet mignon and canneloni, he knew and charmed le tout New York. But after three decades, Mr. Sardi stopped spending 14 hours a day in his restaurant. The glamour quotient dipped, the carpets got thinner, the patina on the banquettes turned to dinge, and food from industrial cans became the kitchen's mainstay. By 1987, The Zagat New York City Restaurant Survey called the place a "culinary laughing stock." One customer who was surveyed called Sardi's "The longest-running gag on Broadway." A Namesake as Receiver

This didn't stop the tour buses. Nevertheless, four years ago Mr. Sardi sold the restaurant to a group of investors and retired to Vermont. Soon after the sale, the group failed to make its monthly payments. In July, the group closed the restaurant. Pending sale of the site, the courts appointed Mr. Sardi as "temporary receiver." "His hope is that he will get legal possession," said David Garelick, the attorney who represents Mr. Sardi.

In the past five months, the restaurant rumor mills have churned with Sardi-reincarnation plans. At least half-a-dozen well-known operators, including Brian McNally, the impresario of 150 Wooster, considered purchasing the remaining nine-year lease on the property, but the necessary multi-million-dollar overhaul of the vintage dining rooms and kitchen was daunting to most propective buyers. A second investment group convened with visions of restoring the Sardi glory and placing a renowned Italian chef in the kitchen.

It wasn't only the lingering Sardi mystique, its icon status, the ghosts of Broadway-past that set potential buyers and investors spinning with grandiose plans. The restaurant, once among only a handful of large Broadway eating spots, is in the heart of what has become the hottest and most competitive dining area in town. Five new hotels and thousands of square feet of new office and residential space have been opened in the last year. Defying the dining-out economy in other parts of town, restaurateurs have flocked to the Times Square area with modern and shrewdly competitive business plans, multi-million-dollar investors and late-model names of their own.

Last summer, David Liederman, who owns Chez Louis, opened the Broadway Grill, a $2.2 million dining room on 48th Street. The restaurant designer Adam Tihany opened Remi, a high-styled trattoria on West 53d Street that cost about $3 million. Peter Aschkenasy, who owns Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn, is spending more than $2 million to build Chesapeake House, which is to open in late winter at 47th Street and Broadway, only three blocks from Sardi's. Dean & De Luca and Brian McNally are negotiating for food-service space in the Paramount project at 235 West 46th Street.

"Everybody wants to be here," said Mr. Aschkenasy. It's no wonder that investors huffed around Sardi's like so many bellows over a waning flame. Aware but Unworried

But in the end, Sardi reincarnated is simply Sardi redux. Mr. Sardi, who is now 75 years old, spent $500,000 to make minimal repairs to his restaurant and to lay new carpeting and reupholster the banquettes. "My pension plan is my partner," he said yesterday, strolling through the three floors of dining rooms that he has spent most of his life tending. He is not unaware of the brave new restaurant world that is sprouting around him. He is not unconcerned that 48 hours before the opening, his liquor license was still pending and the paint was still wet. He is a believer.

"We got through Prohibition and the Great Depression," he said. His gaze skipped past the hastily reupholstered banquettes, stray wires and unfinished electrical outlets and rested on the gallery of caricatures on the walls. The faces that used to giggle, confide and gossip at his tables, the scores of actors, writers and politicians whom, for half a century, he protected from autograph hounds, now line his walls in frames. "You can't just let a tradition like this go down the drain," he said.

"We already have 52 reservations for Friday night," said the guardian of the 700-seat establishment on Wednesday. "So many lovely people call me on the telephone to wish me well, and I promise them all a free glass of wine."